“Please don't leave it until I am dead to fix up all the things that have been said this morning.”
Ms Brenda Clarke is a resident of an aged care facility in the ACT. She is a retired teacher and has never been a Nurse or in any way directly affiliated with the ANF or equivalent. She contacted the ANF after hearing about the Because We Care campaign looking for further information. She attended a Because We Care function at parliament house where she was able to ask some curly questions. The ACT ANF invited her to give evidence at the Productivity Commission hearing in the ACT. This is the transcript, corrected for errors, of her verbal submission.
MS CLARKE: You can have an aged care facility designed with beautiful gardens and cafes and a theatre and everything else but it's no good if it doesn't have good staff. They need qualified and trained staff, staff who are fluent in the English language so that they can follow instructions verbal or written. Most people coming to our facility now have some degree of dementia and some have other debilitating diseases which mean that the carers have to operate mechanical equipment to get them in and out of bed, to get them into a wheelchair, whatever. They need a lot of care. There are not many in our facility that are like myself who can do things for themselves and speak for themselves if they're there. Now, we are talking about a low-care section of the hostel, it no longer is low care, but the management get over this by saying, "Well, we have ageing in place."
To get people who can look after these people, as well as people like myself, you've got to be able to keep them. They must be paid more money, otherwise they don't stay. I'm particularly referring to nurses and carers. These people are our family. When they leave, if it's someone we've been trusting for some time and have got to know, it's like losing a family member. When you lose one after another, it's very depressing. Carers have heavy and responsible jobs and need to be paid accordingly. Residents who constantly lose their friends through death or dementia do not need to lose staff they have come to trust through less than good pay and conditions.
There are facilities in Canberra which cannot afford to have food cooked on the premises. They get it from large kitchens at Wollongong where it arrives chilled in trucks three times a week. It comes from a company called IRT… I call it Into a Reluctant Throat. We don't need large amounts of food but it should be nutritious and have flavour. We need it for our brains, most important, as well as maintaining general health as we age. I am 89 years old next month. Please don't leave it until I am dead to fix up all the things that have been said this morning.
Ms Clarke then answered questions from the Commissioners
MR FITZGERALD: Thanks very much, Mrs Clarke. Can I ask you, Mrs Clarke, if you wanted to make a complaint in your facility, how easy would that be to do? How easy would it be to make a formal complaint?
MS CLARKE: Well, for me it's not hard, but for most of the residents, it is hard. They will not make a complaint because they're afraid of being thrown out and they will be regarded in disfavour, if you like, by the staff. They will not complain. The boss came round last night, the general manager, at teatime. The soup, I couldn't eat it. It was supposed to be minestrone soup. It was thick, it was salty and it was unpleasant. It was also very greasy because it wasn't hot.
Now, I was approached by the manager - somebody must have complained - and he said to us at our table, "How was the soup?" so I said, "Well, I didn't eat mine, it was greasy." The others - he said to each one, "How did you find it?" They said, "All right." So he said, "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you," and went away. What can you do? Anyway, I make complaints, but the thing is, nothing gets changed. I've been chairman of the residents' committee and I resigned the other day because whatever you put forward, they say they're going to address this, they're going to address that.
Nothing changes. It's very, very frustrating, so I'm going to be on the committee but I'm not going to chair it. As for making a complaint, we're only supposed to do them through a thing called an improvement log. You write on the improvement log whatever has happened and then you put your name on - or you needn't if you don't wish to, but they state that if you don't put your name on, you don't get any feedback. Nine times out of 10 in the past, you haven't had any feedback anyway.
Nobody has come and said, "You're supposed to do this." One of the reasons is that the person who was supposed to come back has been on stress leave since last September and we don't know what's happening. Somebody else is trying to do her work. You put the complaints in. If it's something about the kitchen, the person in charge of the kitchen comes very belligerently and says, "You've put this and that and you've put this and that. We do this and that." You don't get anywhere.
MS MACRI: Can I ask you, Mrs Clarke, in terms of accreditation, and I presume the facility has been through accreditation.
MS CLARKE: Yes, it was.
MS MACRI: Were you able to sit down with the auditors and have a chat to them quite independently?
MS CLARKE: No, I wasn't. I don't know why. I think we were able to put our names forward if we wanted to see anybody but I didn't because I knew that if they got any negative feedback, then they would know it came from me, because nobody else would speak out. So I backed out of that unfortunately. I don’t intend to do that again.
MS MACRI: That's a bit sad, isn't it?
MS CLARKE: Yes, it is.
MR FITZGERALD: Thanks for that.
MS CLARKE: Does that answer your question?
MR FITZGERALD: Yes, it does, very much so. Thank you very much.
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